Chinese Food Abroad
Wednesday 14 May 2025
Joita Das, ‘Cha, Chini, Cheena Bazaar: Food and Fusion in the Making of the Indian-Chinese Community of Calcutta’
The overseas Chinese of India (‘Indian-Chinese’) share the same historical trajectory as their Southeast Asian counterparts, having come and settled down in Calcutta between the 18th and 20th centuries. Yet literature on their food and culinary practices is scarce. This presentation will examine the ways in which Chinese food in India celebrates the small, Indian-Chinese community’s history of migration and settlement in Calcutta. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted over the past year with Indian-Chinese chefs and restaurant and business owners, it examines how processes of localization—including the incorporation of indigenous ingredients and cooking techniques—enabled migrants to reinvent their food and culinary practices in a foreign land. By focusing on moments of hybridity and culinary fusion, this presentation explores how food helped orient early Chinese migrants in India towards both their home and host societies through space and continues to do so through time
Nan Xiang, ‘How Dublin’s Novel Chinese Restaurants Pursue Distinction’
Chinese restaurants are everywhere in Ireland, but we rarely talk about their place in Irish food culture. My research on Irish Chinese restaurants began with an examination of a phenomenon: in recent decades, a few restaurants have shed the cheap image of ethnic cuisine and achieved a higher status in the Irish culinary prestige hierarchy. This new type of restaurants renders the category of ethnic cuisine problematic. Framing the restaurant world as a field of cultural production, I conceptualize this shift as agents accumulating cultural capital to improve their field position. I argue that cultural capital is not merely the legitimate taste of the dominant class, but the techniques and consciousness embodied by individuals and objectified in their practice. This perspective can challenge static notions of cuisine and ethnicity and highlight the subjectivity of restaurateurs and chefs that goes beyond the structuring effect of habitus.
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